The company brought devs and recruiters to a campus job fair. I chatted with a dev at the job fair and submitted my resume there. I received a follow up email from their recruiter setting up a phone screen with their recruiter. The phone screen took about 20 minutes and consisted of the recruiter asking me pretty simple algorithms and data structures questions. After that phone screen I was requested to submit transcripts to the company and was asked to setup a phone screen with one of their hiring managers. The phone screen with the hiring manager took about 30 minutes and had some slightly more difficult technical questions. A few days after completing the second phone interview I was asked to come to an onsite interview at their office in Ann Arbor. The interview at the office consisted of a short behavioral interview with the hiring manager and a developer who had worked there for a few years. Following the behavioral interview was a white-boarding question and then they sat me down at a computer and presented some Java code for me to optimize. The whole interview was about three and a half hours long.
None of the interview questions were horribly difficult but I definitely couldn't see myself working there, the culture wasn't a good fit for me. In the office there was probably 15-20 developers but I only interacted with the two interviewers, no one seemed very approachable or social, everyone looked like they just kept their heads down and did their work. The hiring manager and developer I talked to also didn't do a great job on selling the position. I know SaaS isn't exciting but you have to get candidates excited about the challenging problems you're working on at your company, I'm definitely not going to want to work somewhere where I'll be bored.
The interview process up until the on site interview was organized and pretty straightforward but when I came onsite and after that point the company was very unorganized. I drove about 4.5 hours from school to get to the office and the interview started immediately when I got there (I don't think anyone can interview well after sitting in a car for 4.5 hours). There was no offer of a meal of any kind (but they did get Jimmy Johns delivered randomly and I was offered that, good thing I'm not a vegetarian). There was no itinerary of what to expect when I arrived, no offer to provide a hotel to stay at, and no advice on where to park. I informed the hiring manager and the recruiter I already had an awesome offer available to me from another company but they made no rush to give me a decision before the deadline, the fact they didn't seem to care was a red flag.
The biggest issue I had with this hiring process was that I received zero reimbursement for travel, parking, or food. This is a serious issue when I end up traveling over 500 miles round trip (about 9 hours of driving). I provided my mileage and receipts for parking but when I contacted the recruiter about reimbursement multiple times, I received no reply. Had I known I wouldn't be reimbursed to travel that far I definitely would have turned down the on site interview.
